What every mother returning to WTA Tour post-maternity should learn from Belinda Bencic & Elina Svitolina

Becoming a mother used to be some sort of a death sentence when it comes to a tennis career, which is why so many players in the past decided or elected to push it back as far as possible. There has been a change to that approach in recent times, with a couple of tennis players becoming mothers in the middle of their careers as opposed to later on, which has been lauded as positive by outspoken feminist tennis player Andy Murray.

Examples of Tatjana Maria and Serena Williams, who both became mothers and returned to the sport, are wonderful, but they’re more in line with the previous sentiment, as neither did it at their peak. Examples of Elina Svitolina and Belinda Bencic are more the modern version because both are closer to their peak when it happened. We won’t count Naomi Osaka because her pregnancy was not a planned one as opposed to these other two.

So what can female tennis players learn from the likes of Bencic and Svitolina in navigating a pregnancy and returning to the top? Well, they both had a rather similar approach in how they re-entered the competitive tennis landscape post-pregnancy.

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Elina Svitolina’s return

Miami Open Presented by Itau 2025 - Day 1 - Source: Getty

When Elina Svitolina opted to return to the sport, she first played in Charleston, which granted her a wild card on top of hosting a fundraiser for the Ukrainian cause. That didn’t go as well because it was a level too high for Svitolina at the time.

What she did after that is what ultimately needs to be learnt from the approach both she and Bencic had. Svitolina didn’t go to the highest level but kept it local in Switzerland, where she lives with her husband Gael Monfils. She opted to play in Chiasso, which is an ITF event, and it was there that she finally earned her first win.

After playing at that event, she went to Oeiras, which was another ITF event before slowly working her way to the WTA Tour with a couple of more events. What those ITF events allowed her was to play tennis on a lower level so that she could build up her confidence as well as the physical stamina that she was lacking at the time of her return.

With both facets improving, she slowly but surely started to win on the WTA Tour, which further improved both aspects en route to what ended up being a really strong overall campaign upon her return.

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Belinda Bencic’s return

Belinda Bencic employed basically the same tactic as Svitolina did upon her return to tennis. In fairness to Bencic, there weren’t too many events when she elected to play as it was the end of the year. She played a couple of ITF events to get her feet wet, so to speak, before finally returning to the tour in a proper way in 2025.

The return on the lower levels allowed her to find her game and level among lower competition, which she could beat at the time without really crushing her confidence by trying to beat players who were both in better shape than her and also just at a higher level.

It wasn’t one or two events either because it was a couple of ones that she opted to play before returning to the top level of tennis. It’s something that Naomi Osaka, for example, didn’t do as she struggled for a long time before finally starting to win matches because she was competing with players that were on a different level physically than her.

The hitting was clean, but the movement was very poor, and she simply couldn’t create the margins needed to win a match.

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Conclusion

The conclusion from the approaches of these two players and that of Osaka is very simple. You have to ease yourself into it because if you try to do too much too early, you’re not likely to succeed. Tennis is a sport of consistency, and when you rush back without that consistency, you’re not likely to find it easy to win.

After all, it’s a sport of details, and these small margins make all the difference. If you’re not moving as swiftly as you should be, then you’re going to be late on the ball, you won’t hit it cleanly, and the opponent will be able to create more space with their own shots.

The more important conclusion from these instances of motherhood is that it’s not a death sentence as it once was. Becoming a mother and returning to have a successful career can be done; it’s being done in real time by a couple of players, so in the future, more and more women will not push this back thinking that it will ruin their career because it won’t.